Industry History | Sherwin-Williams — Two Thousand Dollars on Superior Street
· 1866-7
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Industry History | Sherwin-Williams — Two Thousand Dollars on Superior Street
kevin
People treat Sherwin-Williams as a glass tower that was always a national paint chain.
The first Cleveland pin was a bookkeeper's stake in a decorating shop.
Henry A. Sherwin arrived from Vermont in 1860. He kept books for a dry-goods house and then for a wholesale grocer, and by July 1866 he had saved 2,000 dollars in 1866 money.
He put that sum into Truman Dunham and Company, an importer of paints, oils, pigments, brushes, and window glass at 118 Superior Street downtown.
The Dunham partnership dissolved in February 1870. Sherwin, Alanson T. Osborn, and Edward P. Williams formed Sherwin, Williams, and Company and kept the retail rooms on Superior.
First-year sales of the new partnership reached 422,390.97 dollars in 1870 money, a figure preserved in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
In 1873 the partners bought a Standard Oil cooperage at 601 Canal Street in the Flats and turned it into their first factory for paste paints, oil colors, and putty. The Cuyahoga, not a marketing slogan, was the reason the plant sat there.
The useful invention was packaging. In 1877 the firm patented a resealable paint can, the lid a painter could close without a mallet. Ready-mixed oil colors followed, so a customer no longer had to grind pigment on site.
The company incorporated in Ohio on 16 July 1884. It never left Cleveland. The present headquarters occupies a new downtown tower at 1426 West Third Street, a short walk from the Superior address of 1866.
The public pin is the sidewalk around that tower. The plant on the river is gone from daily view. What remains is a Cleveland company that still makes paint in the city where a bookkeeper bought into a shop.
Photo: Geowizical, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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